


The smile on your face need never rust

by drcalvin



Category: Rómeó és Júlia (Színház)
Genre: Cemetery, Conversations with the dead, Elegy, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Science Fiction, Space Verona, not as depressing as it sounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-20 01:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2409836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drcalvin/pseuds/drcalvin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Benvolio doesn't bring any flowers to Romeo's grave. He only brings himself. Words, sometimes. New songs if he has heard them, though he rarely goes to the taverns these days. </i>
</p><p>A story about losing, coping and moving on without forgetting that you used to dance with kings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The smile on your face need never rust

There are always flowers on Romeo's grave. You see them blaze from halfway across the graveyard: dewy-fresh yellow roses, cornflowers, and the occasional bone-white trumpets of lilies rising above the colors. Benvolio knows Romeo's mother brings the cornflowers, the one Montague-blue symbol the young master would consent to wear without a fuss. 

The lilies smell of dignity and death; if the prince sends them in silence, they are a cowardly choice. If the fallen priest sends them...ah, well. 

Benvolio doesn't think about the yellow roses too hard. Roses were flowers Romeo gave. He thinks his old friend would be upset to see others give them to his lady wife – but then they are yellow. Maybe she liked the color? 

Benvolio doesn't bring any flowers to Romeo's grave. He only brings himself. Words, sometimes. New songs if he has heard them, though he rarely goes to the taverns these days. 

Mostly he brings silence to the rusty-red earth mound, leans against the cool basalt and tries to… well. 

The good thing about cornflowers is that they can survive even the harsh air of Verona. They are hardy against radiation leaking through the shield, their roots dig deep into the soil (deeper than Romeo the dreamer ever did), and they endure. Even if you tear off their petals until only a hairy, spider-like lump remains, they endure. 

Benvolio comes empty-handed to Romeo's grave, brings no flowers. But when he leaves, his steps are lighter, as he piles up a mound of stones on the rusty-red earth.

* * *

He only visited Mercutio's official resting place once after the funeral. It was too silent and gloomy in the crypt. The last funeral candles had gone out, though the smell of dying lilies lingered. Benvolio's tears, always near the surface in those early days, broke free and he fell to his knees before the marble-faced princes of old. 

This, then, was where fiery Mercutio the free would end his days? With not even a window to see the stars, or to turn his eyes downwards to whistle after the pretty girls below? 

He cried as he had not dared cry during the funeral, loud wails echoing beneath the castle, and he was still crying when the deep voice of his lord interrupted him. 

_It is only his name that rests here, young Montague._

Only his name. Only the years of his short life, and the shorter list of his proper deeds. 

Mercutio Escalus. 

If he slept among the rock-strewn fields of Beyond; if he was hidden in a jeweled pot in the Prince's room; if he had been laid where he belonged, ashy embrace curled around his beloved – brother, friend, more at the asking – none of that the Prince shared. And seeing his eyes, colder even than the stones of the crypt, Benvolio did not dare ask. 

If it was a lie to comfort him, the last waning flame of Verona's improper youth, then comfort he would take. 

Benvolio does not go back to the crypt again. He has no need to, for Romeo lies with his wife beneath basalt. Wherever Romeo is found, sooner or later, so too shall come Mercutio.

* * *

"...and after that, of course the stuck-up little bint never wanted to see me again," Benvolio finishes his tale of woe. "Can't blame her, I don't much want to see me these days and I haven't even puked on my skirts in ages – but your mom, man. Your mom!" He tries to give a friendly nudge in Romeo's general direction, but basalt is cold and unforgiving. "Last year, she'd not have married me off to the baker's daughter and now this. Could you try to nudge her a bit back to the whole 'Benvolio is an unworthy rascal of dubious character' mindset again? For my sake?" 

His butt is growing cold. Winter in Verona is never freezing, but the roses have lost their flowers. As perturbed as Benvolio is with Lady Montague and her increasing attempts to get him to settle, he leaves the still-struggling cornflowers alone. 

There haven't been fresh lilies left in over two months and he'd hate to deprive Romeo of the chance to morbid introspection. Benvolio tries to be a good friend, but he never had much philosophical flair, nor the old priest's skill at lightening Romeo's gloom. 

"Good Lord, this place is depressing," he exclaims, looking at the reddish earth and looming towers of family gravestones with a new eye. "Rich bastards like the Scrovignis should be able to afford something, shouldn't they?" Pansies, probably, considering how they used to creep around when Mer – 

Benvolio winces. Ah. But the pansies are still plentiful and alive. He hies himself off the cold earth and goes over – not directly, won't do to show too much curiosity, but he figures Romeo is tired of hearing him whine about his mom by now anyway – and indeed; there is a pitiful little baby Scrovigni buried not five years ago, the date of death and birth eerily close. But before that? Benvolio vaguely recalls when they held the funeral for the old biddy. Given the stern look from her funeral portrait, he wouldn't have been in a hurry to dig around in the earth covering her. 

"Damn pansies," Benvolio mutters. Next time, he should bring a pillow to sit on.

* * *

Benvolio walks up the hill towards the Montague family grave, his feet automatically choosing the right path while his mind remains caught in the city. He had never had a head for numbers and familiarity had not warmed him to them. True, even Benvolio could figure out the gross price of bulk xenon, but to know where and to whom to ship them on any given week? He'd have as much success looking into his tea leaves, than working himself into a headache with statistics and predictions.

He rubs his forehead. Blinks several times in a row, eyes stinging as had he literally spent a few hours at his desk. This was taking the thing a bit far, wasn't it? Benvolio had only thought about shipping calculations in the vaguest sense, not actually… 

There are no fresh flowers by the Montague stone. No yellow roses for sweet Julia, nor the hardy cornflowers which Lady M. sent out only two days ago – he'd signed the bill himself – and his eyes are tearing. 

"Holy crap." Benvolio wipes his nose. Mucus only, no blood. Good. But the scent of chlorine in the air and it's a good thing Benvolio has learned to laugh and drink and run like the wind all at once, because he needs to be down at the cemetery gate yesterday, and preferably he needs to not breathe before he reaches it. 

Why, why, why did he ever think those goddamned bastard Capulet assholes could manage something so simple as keeping an eye on the cupolas? The cemetery is within their segment, their responsibility. It strikes Benvolio only now, despite the many long Freeday afternoons he has spent conversing with Romeo, that he has never seen the telltale green of repair scaffolding, nor sensed the tang of lingering ozone from solidity tests – not anywhere near the cemetery cupola. 

It takes the Montague work teams three whole days to sweep through their own area, and there has not been a month when they have not patched and repaired some little thing. It has been nine months since Romeo took his life in grief and Benvolio hasn't sat around learning numbers and juggling proposals and endured the jeers from people who don't understand that he would swap every new promotion, every responsibility, for one more night of seeing Romeo and Mercutio steal away with the sweetest girls as thoughtlessly as if were they plucking pebbles from the road. Benvolio hasn't worked and gritted his teeth and _not fucking followed them_ straight into the grave to die here because of some stupid, sloppy Capulets! 

"Breach!" he yells out, his lips burning and his tongue feeling coated with chlorine – but no blood, not yet, and his voice carries and he sees the tired old guard jerk awake. "Cupola breach, you dickhead, raise the alarm!" 

The alarm goes on. It turns out that the Prince has left near the cemetery, that hard-to-vent open area, some of the last working force generators. Benvolio should be grateful. Yeah, okay, he is grateful. His eyes still sting despite the water-and-milk flushing they give him as an emergency measure. For all that Mercutio cursed Verona as if he wished the whole city to tumble with him into the grave, Benvolio has grown somewhat fond of the old rust heap. 

But there is no going through those force fields for months. They'll have to route the repair around outside, which will take both time and resources. Old Capulet must have metric tonnes of inert gases left in the nearest depot, even if he's apparently done dickall to actually direct his workers…and the Prince's overseer doesn't sound as if he intends to let him get away with flubbing this, but…. 

Benvolio flicks through a quick estimate of the repair time and almost breaks his slide-ruler when he tries to recalculate. 

He drinks some more water. Waves off a servant who tries to usher him home. Counts again; numbers were always his foes. 

They are no more friendly after he has beaten them into submission, because they stubbornly show the same thing. 

There will be no glory of roses for Julia's birthday. There will be no Montague-blue cornflowers from the mother to the son, to commemorate the day of his passing. 

He wishes almost, for a mad moment, that he could join Mercutio in the crypt to cry freely again – but that dank hole is empty. As it should be. 

It is good that they blame the tears on noxious gasses and lead him gently, gently, home. It is good, because recently Lady Montague has gray in her hair and a stoop to her back and it is Benvolio who manages more and more of her business. Benvolio Montague, whom the Prince invites for dinner once a month, who has no business weeping like a child that they will leave him alone again, in the hot nights when Juno's month returns to remind him of all that he has lost.

* * *

Róza has hair like albino snakes, eyes like the flash of a blade and a temper that matches the rest. Hers were apparently the tiny nu-pearls Benvolio would brush away from the rusty earth without giving them a second though. He went always on Freedays; she chose to visit on Moon Days, when he was invariably stuck in lessons. 

"Well, don't just sit around and mope, then, you asshole!" she yells, spittle flying until he expects to be burned by the acid from her snake-like hair. "We can't leave the entire cemetery cordoned off until autumn!" 

"What do you want me to do?" 

Benvolio wants to scream back, yank her braids and hit her face until they're falling down in a full-on brawl like he hasn't been in for almost a year. "The Prince has jurisdiction, the Capulets have responsibility. I can't snap my fingers and make it better." 

She sneers at him. "You sound just like them, now. I thought it was still – hah!" She covers her face and for a moment, Benvolio is uncertain if she is weeping or laughing at him. Then he recognizes the tune she hums. " _Kings of the world, striving in vain… Stuck at the top, in their cages of gold…_ " 

"Shut up! Don't you dare!" His papers are shoved to the side, Benvolio is kneeling on his desk yelling at her to shut up, shut up, will you just shut the fuck _up_ and he's shaking her, screaming as she sings and sings until her voice breaks on the thrice-cursed song.

Benvolio doesn't care if he's hurting her, can't care about her nails gouging lines down his chest. Not when there's the echo of that laughing voice, mocking but always so tempting: singing to him from the streets, singing them all away from duty and dry, dusty, horrid responsibility. There is banging on his door, outrage and scandal soon to enter, but he doesn't give a fuck about any of that right now. It doesn't matter, not when Róza's voice breaks in the middle of a word. She – howls, nothing human in the noise tearing out of her and Benvolio howls along with her, like the street dogs they used to be when Mercutio led their pack and Romeo held them together and they were never truly alone. 

"Just because Capulet is useless," she manages at last, voice thick with tears and fury, "do you have to be too?" 

He shakes his head. It hurts, but it's nothing chemical burning him this time. Only a seal inside, put under too much pressure for too long. "I guess – I can – who the hell am I supposed to talk to, then? Last I saw the old man, I said I'd…" 

"You'd piss on him if he was on fire, but only 'cuz he'd fathered Julia. I heard, damn it, half the town did." Róza wipes her eyes on her sleeve. 

Benvolio finds a paper without too many numbers and tries to use it as a tissue; he still can't get over that the shirts he wears cost more than he'd had to live on for a quarter before. 

"Writing paper makes shit tissue," he grouses, and misses Mercutio with a fierce ache when nobody turns his clumsy words into effortless wit. 

"No shit, genius?" Róza yanks her hair, then smacks him – but lightly, almost friendly, as friendly as they got back in the day – when he tries to use her sleeve. 

She hides her pain again and he yells at the servants to leave them alone. Then sits next to her on the ruin of his desk.

"The Nurse," she tells him after a while. 

Benvolio looks around in befuddlement. What nurse? 

"Julia's nurse," Róza continues, tsking at him. "Bet you a wank she's the one with the roses." 

"What, really?" Benvolio had always – as far as he allowed himself to consider the issue, because Julia was Romeo's wife and thus perfect, but her family was a bag of mad cats and bastards – assumed they came from Capulet house. Mother, father, either one. Both. "They must cost a fortune." 

Roses don't even last a month in Verona's regular harsh soil. The Prince is proud of his gardens, with all right; he needs to marshal an army of gardeners to keep them from withering into dust-colored deserts. 

"I checked the Capulet grave, on the other side," Róza admits. "Thought I'd…oh, hell, I dunno. I was drunk. You were busy, as usual. And no Tybalt to aggro." 

Tybalt. Benvolio has spent a great deal of time not thinking of him either. It isn't beneficial for his new status as a Role Model, nor for his ability to not drown himself in a bottle. 

"I think I had some really stupid ideas on the way there. Or I just wanted to mope in peace, I can't recall, because I got distracted when I got down to their end." She chews her lip in silence for a moment. "They've got glass flowers, did you know that? Ruby roses, tiny trees in gold, some huge vine climbing all over the – it's a real explosion of silver and red, you can’t even see the back of the stone. All in glass." She waves his hand to shush him and continues, eyes closed as she speaks on. "It's at least twice the size of Montague's plot. I bet Mercutio would love it; I've never seen more bling in one place. But only glass, or maybe real rubies, hell would I know? Someone must spend a lot of time dusting it, because it looked spotless." 

"I guess glass roses don't wither when there's a leak," Benvolio says, but he feels discomfited by this information. Restless. And oh, he has changed; where he'd once have tried to run away, laugh it off, he bends forward and begins picking up his things instead. 

"No. But come on, it's Tybalt we're talking about here. Bastard deserves at least a heap of thistles, no?" 

He hears it then, in the back of his head: A shard of laughter, usually pulled out by Mercutio, with words that stuck like fish-hooks yet hauled a note of merriment from the depth of Tybalt's gloom. 

"God, yes…." Even Tybalt deserves thistles – or any other stubborn, prickly, living thing. Anything but frozen glass, perfectly shaped and turned into whatever its owner desires, without will or temper of its own. 

Róza's heels drum against the side of the desk while Benvolio folds and refolds his paper. He hesitates, then speaks: "If we dig deep enough in her stuff, I think Lady M –” 

"She seriously lets you call her that?" 

"Sure, she loves it." And who is she going to replace him with? "Anyway, I think she's got some old rags that could fit you. Ow! No, listen, then you talk to Nurse. And I'll tackle the Prince." 

"And then what?" 

Benvolio considers. In the month of Juno, the nights are hot and intense. Lovers are restless and fights quick to break out. 

"Then we'll plant flowers on their graves. Roses and cornflowers and…" 

"Thistles?" 

"If we can find any outside of a picture book! Not sure the seed bank keeps type of plant." But they'll find something else then, wild and irritating and not even near as graceful as a ruby-glass rose or a delicate golden tree. 

"And we'll plant them, where?" 

Benvolio thinks of an empty crypt with a gold-embossed name. He's a Lord in all practical ways now, if not yet in name, and he has learned many of Verona's unspoken truths. He knows well that the rust-colored mound beneath the basalt stone was turned over merely as ceremony. Never covering more than a few locks of hair, a ring and a memory. Nobles and commoners alike – the Prince's gardens need ever more rich, black soil, and the great bio-treatment plants on the southernmost edge of the cupola churn eternally hungry. 

But Benvolio has spent nine months speaking to Romeo, knowing that he rests beneath the cornflowers, that he dances with his sweet wife, that somewhere beyond rainbows and mortality they hold their newborn daughter beneath a domeless blue sky, that he listens and understands and loves, still, in that limitless way that drove him on and on until he found a heart as deep as his own. 

The kings of the world only see the gray numbers and the harsh truths, and when the golden dreamers die, it drives them to drink and death. 

But Benvolio was born a street dog.

"We'll plant fire-lilies too," he says, "and we'll tease Mercutio about how they pale in comparison to his hair." 

"Isn't he beneath the castle?" Róza says, but her voice is neither interrogating nor accusing now. She listens, and the tears are drying on her cheek. 

"He never was," Benvolio says, speaking all the truth. "You think he'd let them go on alone? They're all there, beneath the flowers." 

"Well, then you'd better get a move on and put them back. I can't be having with no zombies coming up here to complain, and you know how fussy Romeo could be about his girlfriends and their fancy gifts."

* * *

The basalt is cool against his back. Comfortable, even if Peter has teased him that he's wearing a groove into it. 

The woven pillow beneath him, however, is definitely on its last breath – he can feel the plastic dissolve into a prickly mess. Benvolio wonders if he could bribe some of the Capulet servants to share their blankets once they arrive – they always come earlier than his own house, perhaps because Nurse doesn't even pretend to care who sees them as she leads the way. Not that he thinks Lady M. would care, but… Propriety. She's still trying to mold him into the shape Romeo never fit into. 

"So as I was saying, there's this cousin of yours, Mercutio…tiny slip of a girl, from Ravenna? You remember her? Anyway, she's shorter than me and pretty funny, and I dunno, that seems like something we could work from, I think. No offense, Tibbles, but I had a look at those two Capulet girls Nurse suggested and they were like – ” He stretches his arm as far above his head as it will go, which still doesn't do the two leggy Amazons justice. "Also, they had your _nose_ , man. Julia, no offense – your cousin's side of the family totally got all the scary while you got all the hot… Ahem, yeah, anyway. I don't want a wife who looks like she'll happily eat me for breakfast. Um. No, not like that, Mercutio. If you have nothing useful to contribute, you can just buzz off, I'm trying to – " 

"You do know that people say the newly minted Lord Montague is bonkers, even without you talking to dead people and herbs?" 

"Go blow a donkey, Peter my dear," Benvolio says sweetly. 

"Can't, you shagged them all into exhaustion yesterday." The gangly Capulet retainer sinks to his knees on the ground, gardening gloves already in place. He has brought the usual roses, and small pots of an unknown green plant. As if sensing Benvolio's suspicious gaze, Peter puts a defensive hand around them. "Master Tybalt was a bit hard to get to know," he says without meeting Benvolio's gaze, "but his friendship was worth cultivating." 

"I'm not saying anything." 

"You're thinking it, very loudly." 

"Yes, but you have to admit the dandelions were really hard to get rid of without killing everything else." They had escaped the grave area! Unheard of! "And we're not even going to talk about the nettles – I still wonder who thought that was worth saving in a seed-bank way back when." 

"Technically speaking, those cornflowers you are so fond of are also a _weed_ ," Peter points out, the supercilious little ass. 

"They don't try to bite me," Benvolio retorts, then groans, because he walked right into that one. 

"He did that sometimes." Peter's response isn't the least surprising. "But only if you asked nicely." That bit…isn't either. Not completely. Not if you'd ever made the mistake of asking Mercutio what his most unlikely conquest was when he was too drunk to lie, but too sober to pass out before he'd shared every detail. 

"Where is everyone else, by the way?" Smooth, Benvolio, bet he didn't notice that change of topic. 

"We're bringing more gear than usual today…" There is a small, satisfied smile on Peter's face as he finishes planting the roses and the most recent experiment. 

The experiment has small, almost fuzzy leaves, and Benvolio makes sure not to poke them by mistake. "Any date I should've recalled?" None of them were born in autumn, he is almost certain.

Peter shakes his head. "The lady of the house is coming." 

Oh. Benvolio lays a hand against the stone. "Did you hear that, Julia? Your mom is coming for a visit." 

A proper one, he dares hope, recalling the death-day ritual in a graveyard still dusty with air-scrubbing reagents. Aged five years in one had been the lady of the house, when he saw her leaning on her husband. They were both wrapped in mourning clothes, alcohol-induced lethargy making each step stiff and tired as they walked up the winding roads, neither seeing nor caring that the newly named Lord of Montague followed. Benvolio forgave them that day, watching the Capulets at the grave where they thought their children lay dead, beneath the timeless perfect mockery of gaudy glass. 

"Any chances of Romeo talking to his father-in-law soon?" 

Peter shrugs and Benvolio nods. Time will tell; he has Lady Montague's permission – grudgingly given – for this informal peace conclave on hallowed ground, but she bends not an inch before his entreaties to join them. 

Peter has finished putting the hyper-capsules into the soil and the plants seem almost to stretch, winding upwards towards the filtered sun; one mighty push while the water and nutri-gel is sweet, before they are reduced to drinking rust and alkaloids, like most of Verona. Benvolio recalls the taste to this day, and has already begun to invest in a more wide-reaching filtration system. "So what are you trying out for Tibbles today, then?" 

"It's an old medicinal herb," Peter says, drizzling water over the rapidly growing plant. "They used to call it poppy."

**Author's Note:**

> The flowers aren't chosen with any special eye at flower-language (British Victorian nor Italian), but for what I connected to the characters.
> 
> Oh, and Róza is imagined as an actress I saw live with long, blond dreads in case anyone wonders why she's not dark-haired like on the DVD.


End file.
